Then Tom swung into Silveret’s saddle—he never took the carriage when he could ride—and rode out at a frisky hand-gallop, raising his hat to his family. As he passed Sally, in the misty twilight where the road curved down the mountain, he touched the brim again, in salute.

Then he was gone.

Along Mulberry Row, and in the cabins that dotted the woods on the back-side of the mountain, all the cocks had commenced their second crowing. In less than an hour the carpenters would be starting their hammering, the white craftsmen Tom had hired commencing the more exacting labor of plastering the new rooms. The whole mountain smelled of the smoke of breakfast-fires. As Sally descended to her cabin she saw that the door of the joiner’s shed stood open.

Her first thought was Mr. Dinsmore’s up early…. Which was totally uncharacteristic of the young Irishman who’d come to do the fine carpentry within the house.

Her second, Why is there no lantern-light inside? was still half-formed in her head when a shadow appeared in the doorway, a huge hand reached out and caught her wrist. Sally’s hand was coming back to claw, her breath dragging into her lungs to scream, when she saw in the chilly dawn light that it was Lam Hawkin.

He swept her into the joiner’s shed with a violence that pulled her off her feet, shut the door, not with a kick, but with soundless swift care.

“I can’t stay.” His fingers were already pressed to her lips. “And I can’t be seen here—”

“You’re a free man, Lam.” Sally pushed his hand away. “Who you runnin’ from?”

“I don’t know. And what I tell you, you must swear to keep to yourself, for your own sake and your boys’. Or they’ll be after you, too, Sally, to keep you silent.”

In his eyes she saw everything: the lights bobbing through the darkness to the trees, the way the carpenters had looked at her yesterday. The strange black man disappearing fast in the direction of the woods.

Who? died on her lips and even her breath felt stilled for a moment, as if she’d been slammed against a wall.

Then she whispered, “Is it a revolt?”

Lam nodded.

And she remembered: It was what the French King had asked, when someone told him about the rioters seizing the Bastille. Is it a revolt? The messenger had replied, No, sire, a revolution.

A terrible complex shiver went through her, born of a thousand memories. She felt cold, as if, the grannies said, a goose had walked across her grave. A revolution.

She whispered, “Sam and Peter Carr were down in Richmond two days ago, they hadn’t heard—”

“It ain’t started yet. I don’t know when it will start. Soon, I think, before the tobacco harvest. It’s big, Sally, and it’s organized like an army, with scouts and spies and recruiters. And it’s spreadin’. They got lieutenants workin’ in secret, in Henrico County, an’ Hanover, an’ Caroline, an’ Louisa Counties. They got secret workshops makin’ bullets, hammerin’ plow-iron into pikes. They gonna take Richmond, they say, an’ make a kingdom of black men, where none are slaves to none. Just like Toussaint did in Saint-Domingue, nine years ago.”

“An’ kill the whites?” Sally remembered the torrent of panic that had swept Virginia, just after her own return from France, at the news that in the wake of the French Revolution, the slaves in the French sugar-island of Saint-Domingue—who outnumbered the whites on the island ten to one—had risen in revolt. They had slaughtered not only the whites, but the free colored caste of artisans, slaveholders, shopkeepers there. Two French fleets had been defeated there so far. The blacks were still free.

Lam’s eyes shifted. “Some of ’em. I hear there’s some they won’t, those they feel are on their side and will help.”

She felt the half-truth through her skin but said nothing. No man who owned slaves, no matter what he’d written about equality and freedom, would be considered on their side. Nor would his family.

“Sally, I took a chance comin’ here to warn you. Because I trust you. And I don’t want to see you hurt, or your boys hurt. I don’t know when it’ll happen, but when it does, I’ll come here, me an’ my girls.” Lam had married the year after Sally had returned to Tom, the cook-girl of a Charlottesville lawyer. He’d bought their two daughters as they were born, and had saved up about half the two hundred dollars it would take to free his wife, when she’d died last year. “We’ll go back into the mountains, until it all blows past, for better or for worse. But you gotta be ready to go. We may not have more’n a few minutes to spare. Food, money—all the money you can gather. We gonna need it. An’ you cannot tell, Sally. Not your family, not anyone. Swear to me that.”

He had risked his life, to come up here and tell her. If rebellion was being planned, the community of the unfree would—and could—strike swiftly at a potential talebearer. And no white sheriff would even investigate a black man’s unexplained death.

She whispered, “I swear.” Then: “But if you honestly think a rebellion’s going to succeed, you’re mad. You really think a—a kingdom of black men can stand here in Virginia? That any white will help ’em? The whites got militia, Lam. They got an army up north of ten thousand—”

“That’s exactly what people said when your Mr. Jefferson an’ his friends all spit in the face of the British,” Lam said harshly. “You don’t hear anyone goin’ around these days sayin’ how stupid that was.” He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Whose side you on, Sally?”

She pulled her arm sharply away from his grip. “I am on my children’s side.”

“And your children look white enough to pass for white boys. Or to be killed in mistake for ’em, if killin’ starts.”

Sally knew he spoke the truth. But for years she’d heard Tom talk of the Saint-Domingue rebellion, as he’d talk to her about almost anything that was on his mind at bedtime, in the world-within-a-world that was his room. He talked the way he made music, to clarify his mind, and from things he had said, it was perfectly clear to Sally that the only reason the blacks in Saint-Domingue were still free was because Saint-Domingue was an island, and the French were too busy fighting everyone in Europe to spare an invasion force of sufficient strength.

But in Saint-Domingue, the rebelling slaves had murdered white—and free colored—children along with adults.

“I’m not sayin’ these people is smart or dumb, Sally. And I’m not sayin’ what their chances are. I’m only sayin’ they’re comin’. It could be soon. It could be damn soon.”

Richmond is as full as it can hold, she heard Tom say, of men from all over Virginia. Prominent men, men of property and power….

If they was smart, thought Sally dizzily, NOW would be the time to strike. An attack now would buy ’em time.

And she felt in her heart the slow hot blaze of anger, at the thought of the men and women she’d known in Eppington and Williamsburg, who had been sold away from their families or seen their wives, their husbands, their children sold away.

Who had seen their daughters or their wives or their sisters raped or seduced—who lived daily with the knowledge that any white man could molest them with nothing more to fear than his neighbors saying, Tsk. Who lived hourly with the awareness of men sizing them up, as Tom Randolph and Peter Carr and Jack Eppes sized her up each time she walked past.

Serve them right.

For the unavoidable and unquestioned fact that one day the children Young Tom and Bev played with were all going to be sold away from their families and friends, sent to places where they knew no one; and when they were grown, they’d see their children taken away and sold in turn.

For the sheer unthinkability that a white man would or could feel genuine love for her—unthinkable even by the white man himself.

Serve them right, if it was a thousand times worse.

Outside the window, she heard Young Tom whistling as he came back from the kitchen. Like his father, he was always singing, and Tom had even begun, in his casual way, to teach him to play the fiddle. She said softly, “You better go. The men’ll be up at the Big House soon and they’ll see you if you stay. I swear I’ll be ready, and I swear I’ll tell no one. Thank you, Lam,” she added, as he clapped on his hat, and opened the shed door a crack to make sure the coast was clear. “More than I can say, thank you. You’re a good man.”

He brought the door shut again, regarded her in the gloom. “And you’re a good woman, Sally. I just wish you were as happy as you deserve to be.”

She returned a crooked smile. “We’re all as happy as we deserve to be, Lam. God bless you. I’ll see you soon.”

“That you will, girl.” His eyes grew hard. “That you will.”



Bev’s fever-flush had spread over his face and body. His throat, when she carried him to the cabin’s window to look, was fiercely inflamed. Young Tom was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dish of leftovers from the Big House breakfast, his sharp face worried: “He didn’t eat anything last night, Mama, and now he won’t have anything either.”